


the path unwinding

by renecdote



Series: golden sun doth rise [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Major character death - Freeform, Reincarnation, Robin Dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 09:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17979164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: Dick Grayson doesn’t remember a first time he got shot—he remembers six of them.





	the path unwinding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spread_my_wings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spread_my_wings/gifts).



> Hey so this fic is about reincarnation which means it does involve major character death and some of the scenes are graphic, but Dick does not die in the *now* of the fic.

Dick Grayson doesn’t remember a first time he got shot—he remembers six of them. Blood running into his shoes, dribbling down his chin, sliding off brand new leather, staining grubby white, dripping on filthy concrete, welling up between green fingers while he looks down in horror. Pinpoints of pain like a treasure map across his body, one to be sketched with trepidant fingers until he finds the x for this life. 

The first of the firsts was on narrow English cobblestone. It comes to Dick in dreams, sometimes, startlingly dark and startlingly _real_. The first time he dreamt it, Dick was five and he woke up crying so hard he made himself sick.“It hurts,” he kept saying, while his parents fretted about an illness or injury that wasn’t there, “it hurts it hurts it hurts.” Small hands pressed over his abdomen where he could still feel the bullet as it tore through his spleen.

“Just a dream,” his mother soothed, wiping away tears with her thumb. “It was just a bad dream, little robin. It’s alright.”

But it wasn’t.

And it _wasn’t_.

Dick dreams of the second first time he got shot too. He’s hanging off the mast of an oared frigate while pirates swarm the deck below. The air is filled with battle cries and the heavy, metallic scent of blood on a steamy summer day. But Dick is okay, he’s untouchable up in the sky, safe—right up until the bullet clips his shoulder and sends him tumbling down. Right onto the cutlass that’s waiting for him.

The third time he doesn’t dream about. Not really, just vague shadowy images of the scene leading up to the muzzle of a gun digging into his skull. The first time Dick dreams of that one, he’s nine years old and he wakes up with a blinding migraine. He’s in too much pain to even cry, whimpers nearly soundless against the fuzzy pink of Bruce Wayne’s dressing gown.

He doesn’t tell Bruce about the dreams though. Not then, not the next time, or the next, or the next. Not ever. Even if it was just a dream—it’s not but even if it _was_ —Dick will never tell Bruce because he knows what horrors that would throw up for him. Dark alleys and gunshots that echo over and over, bodies lying dead before the blood has even pooled. Moonlight on broken pearls, scattered across the cobblestones—

No. Bluestone. Cobblestones are Dick’s nightmares. Sometimes he gets confused. It’s not like mixing up details, it’s like all the details are blended together in a violent, cosmic smoothie. All of it is Dick and Dick is all of it, all at once. 

The fourth first time Dick gets shot is his favourite. In this one he _doesn’t die_. There’s a badge around his neck and a Smith & Wesson Model 10 in his hands. His partner’s fiery hair catches the sunlight as they round the corner of an abandoned brewery, completing the circle of officers around the property. Less than ten seconds until they burst in guns blazing—and that’s when the kid runs out. His curly hair is grey from dust and the dream jumps forward in fits and starts until Dick is rolling across the grass, kid clutched to his chest, a rapport of gunfire swelling in the air as pain licks along his arm. 

Dick wakes from dreams of number four feeling satisfied, unwilling to chase the tendrils of that life to its end. He closes his eyes, hugging his knees to his chest, bed covers tucked around his neck like a cape. He falls back asleep with only a twinge of pain in his arm, a barely-there reminder under the balm of saving a life instead of having one ended.

It’s the fifth time that hurts the most. He’s lying in a ditch, choking on blood, thinking he’s too fucking young to die. With every choking breath, the shrapnel peppering his chest shreds a little more of his lungs. “Please,” he whispers through crimson lips, fingers scrabbling weakly at the gun just out of reach. Corporal Shaw won’t look at him. Med evac is seventeen minutes too far away. “Please,” Dick says again, choking on the word, spraying red into the air when he coughs. It hurts so much he blacks out, snapping awake only a few seconds later—rinse, repeat. Dick tries to move his limbs, to _wake the hell up_ but he’s paralysed. He’s paralysed and in pain and _oh god he’s going to die no no not again not again please—_

“I’m sorry,” Shaw says, fingers twitching on the gun. _Thank you_ , Dick mouths—and then he’s jolting upright in bed, chest heaving as he chokes on air and sobs, clawing welts in his skin through cotton pyjamas like he can dig the agony out of his own body.

Dick _hates_ the fifth time.

And then there’s the sixth time Dick Grayson gets shot for the first time: Gotham City, Second National Bank. 

Now. 

The pain that bites through armour and flesh is so familiar and startling that Dick doesn’t even cry out. He presses his hands against his side automatically, the movement ingrained from something more than just Batman’s field medicine training. 

“Batman? I’ve been hit,” Dick says. Calmly. An undercurrent of _ugh not again_ lurking beneath the words—bitterness, wryness, resignation, Dick doesn’t even know. Blood is welling up around the pressure he’s putting on his side. 

“ _Hit?_ ” Batman growls, with the kind of flat tone that means he’s trying really hard to seem calm because he isn’t at all. 

“I’m fine,” Dick says. He can’t stop staring at his side. The pain is setting in—like a bad itch, he can’t escape it and he wants, desperately, to escape it even if it means crawling outside his own skin. “GSW—argh—side. Might be bad. Nng— _shit_.“

Bruce doesn’t tell him to watch his language. He growls, “Put pressure on it. Don’t move.”

Dick almost laughs but the sound gets strangled in his throat. The memories of nightmares are filling his head with static and the pain isn’t just in his side anymore, it’s in his chest, his arm, his shoulder, his head—all of it, all at once, crashing over Dick like he’s a craggy rock beneath a cliff in a violent storm. He can’t breathe. He lifts his hands away from his side to scrabble at his frantically heaving chest instead. Dark streaks on bright red.

Dick slides down the wall and lands in a heap on the floor. It’s squeaky tile and rough cobblestone, dusty concrete and wooden blankets and muddy vegetation. Blood is trickling down his leg. There are too many holes to know which one it’s coming from. 

Someone shouts—Dick thinks it’s his name but he’s not sure which one.Hard white eyes loom over him. 

“Breathe,” Bruce says. “You’re okay, chum, I just need you to breathe.”

There’s black at the edges of Dick’s vision. Everything is so fuzzy. 

“Sorry,” Dick slurs, to Batman, to the faces of ghosts winking in out of existence over the cowl. He tries to grab for them, to hold on, and his fingers skitter uselessly across rough grey and black. Dick whimpers. “Please don’t… ‘M sorry, don’t leave… Hur’s… Don’t let me…. Not again… No’ so soon…”

Batman is talking. A man with fiery hair smiles down at Dick. 

Then something pressed against his side, _hard_ , and all the pain is suddenly there again, sucked bad to the source like a wave back out to sea. It’s staggering, blinding, and Dick’s back arches with a hoarse scream. He is lifted into strong arms and he chokes on another cry because his nerves are like live wires sparking against each other and the world is whirling, or he’s whirling, spinning into a black hole, another life, even though it’s too soon, he wants to stay, he wants—

Dick opens his eyes to the dimmed fluorescent lights of the medical unit in the Batcave and he’s so overwhelmed by the feeling of _not dead_ that he starts to cry. Fat drops that roll silently off his cheekbones and drip into his ears until he turns his head, and then he tastes salt on his lips instead. Bruce is sleeping in a chair beside the bed, neck at an angle he’ll regret in a few hours, but Dick doesn’t wake him. He sniffles and wipes snot and tears on the sleeve of the flannel superman pyjamas Bruce or Alfred must have dressed him in after stitching the wound on his side.

There’s hardly any pain when he shifts and Dick sighs as he fades back into the welcoming arms of drug-induced sleep. 

When he wakes up again a few hours later, cranky and sore, Bruce holds him while Dick tries not to cry again. He wonders if, in the next life or the ones after that, any of the comfort and safety he feels in those arms will bleed over to dim the pain. He is doubtful, but he hopes.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://renecdote.tumblr.com/).


End file.
